On April 26, 1986 at 1:23 am, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant blew up after operators botched a safety test, triggering the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date. Twenty years later, the long shadow of Chernobyl continues to darken lives – socially, environmentally, and physically.

From the first day, officials downplayed the damages of the Chernobyl disaster and the politics of misinformation continues:

A recent United Nations report claims as the result of the disaster an estimated four thousand people will eventually succumb to cancer-related illnesses. But, Greenpeace and other environmental organizations have accused this report of whitewashing Chernobyl’s impact and state that 200,000 people have already died between 1994 and 2000 as a consequence of the accident.

The Chernobyl Power Plant, located 65 miles northwest of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, sits inside the fenced 30 km Exclusion Zone. Radioactive remnants of the failed reactor linger inside the so-called sarcophagus, a 24-story concrete and steel encasement hastily erected after the accident. Radiation levels are so high there that heavily protected workers are only allowed one shift of 15 minutes per day. The evacuated town of Pripyat, once inhabited by 50,000 Chernobyl plant workers, is a chilling ghost town still littered with the remnants of its hasty abandonment. Within the Exclusion Zone, in dozens of abandoned villages collapsed houses are disappearing under overgrowth; stray dogs – looking more like wolves – maraud for food. Ignoring radiation levels, 400 elderly people have returned to their homes.
On assignment for National Geographic magazine, the thawing of bureaucratic barriers in Ukraine enabled Gerd Ludwig to move freely within the Exclusion Zone and delve deeper into Chernobyl reactor than any other Western photographer.
Twenty years ago, here in the control room of Unit #4 operators committed a fatal series of errors, triggering the reactor meltdown that resulted in the world’s largest nuclear accident to date.

An amazing riding through the Dead Zone , into the Ghost Town ,
in what really has been our Resident Evil Area in the middle of 80’s
Thanks to Helena , you can watch what humans have been able to create ,
a wasteland that will remain “infected” for thousand years to come yet .-ENTER to CHERNOBYL (Mirror 1)

-THE CHERNOBYL JOURNAL (A TRIP INTO THE DEEP HEART OF THE GHOST TOWN OF PRIPYAT)

At 1:23:40 the operators pressed the AZ-5 (“Rapid Emergency Defense 5”) button that ordered a “SCRAM” – a shutdown of the reactor, fully inserting all control rods, including the manual control rods that had been incautiously withdrawn earlier. It is unclear whether it was done as an emergency measure, or simply as a routine method of shutting down the reactor upon the completion of an experiment (the reactor was scheduled to be shut down for routine maintenance). It is usually suggested that the SCRAM was ordered as a response to the unexpected rapid power increase. On the other hand, Anatoly Dyatlov, chief engineer at the nuclear station at the time of the accident, writes in his book:

Prior to 01:23:40, systems of centralized control … didn’t register any parameter changes that could justify the SCRAM. Commission … gathered and analyzed large amount of materials and, as stated in its report, failed to determine the reason why the SCRAM was ordered. There was no need to look for the reason. The reactor was simply being shut down upon the completion of the experiment.